Celine and Anastasia had on more than one occasion taken the opportunity to explore the riverbank and the strange ruins that sometimes clustered round it. Awed, saddened, spooked; like barbaric Anglo-Saxons wandering amidst the ruins of the Roman empire, wondering what terrifying giants could have created such things.
For it had been there in the city-scale ghost town — and near there, in the rebel camps upriver — that Anastasia had been held captive with Robin Mariner. Kidnapped and held to ransom by the freedom fighting army of General Dr Julius Chaka, as a gambit in the campaign that would eventually lead to the death of President Banda and Chaka’s assumption of total power. It was partly a reaction to that, she supposed — to the sense of helplessness, the terror, the soul-destroying tension of knowing nothing but imagining every physical and sexual horror that might be possible — which finally knocked her off the rails. The appalling experience and the discovery that her father, deeply involved with President Banda, would have been happy to bomb the living daylights out of her kidnappers, no matter what the risk to her. In the face of the near-certainty, in fact, that if he did so, then she would die.
Almost immediately after her release, she had run off with the rock band Simian Artillery; becoming their groupie, pet and plaything. It had all been downhill from there. Until the moment she was rescued from the addiction to crack cocaine and the lifestyle she had adopted to support her habit. Not by her outraged father but by Robin Mariner, who had shared her terrible kidnapping ordeal but had been rescued — as had Anastasia herself — by Richard. She had never asked how Robin came to find her — or why she had even bothered to look for her. But the fact that the Mariners cared so much for her had given her the strength at last to start to care for herself. And then to care for others.
As Celine stopped ringing the bell and went forward, surrounded by children, to sit at the front of the church, Anastasia felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned, to confront Ado, one of her favourites. Ado was rising fifteen — ten years Anastasia’s junior — but she was wise in the ways of the forest. Wisdom garnered at the price of scars on her cheeks, back and chest — the devil’s tooth marks of Sande initiation ceremonies. And Anastasia had helped Celine treat the girl for a botched circumcision. Luckily botched in Anastasia’s opinion. The mutilation was minimal. Ado, in due course, would be able to take pleasure in the act of love-making where many of her tribal sisters never would. The tall, self-possessed teenage girl was silently holding out a pile of black stones towards her. It took a moment — and a whiff of fishy odour — for Anastasia to realize that Ado was holding a handful of oysters. Anastasia’s black brows arched in surprise. She knew that oysters were a delicacy down in Granville Harbour but she had never seen any this far upriver. ‘Where did you find these?’ she asked in her rough Matadi — the local dialect.
‘Down by the river,’ Ado answered. ‘Come and see.’
Anastasia nodded and the pair of them left together. Anything to get out of one of Father Antoine’s sermons, thought the Russian woman cynically. It was already dark outside, and the weather seemed threatening. The compound, with its dormitory buildings, palm-thatched lean-tos that doubled as outside classrooms and refectories, was lit by a combination of flickering electric lights and candles — both now attracting the first evening moths but not — blessedly — mosquitoes. The lack of mosquitoes was the deciding factor in their choice of location. The river flowed too swiftly here for them to breed; and even after floods such as they had just experienced, the gradient of the land between the chapel and the river was too steep to allow any dangerous pools of standing water.
Beyond the illuminated area, down towards the river, there was only a deepening, velvety darkness. Anastasia and Ado crossed to Brother Jacob’s generator hut, therefore, and Anastasia reached in to grab the big black steel Maglite torch that the engineer kept for emergencies. It was nearly fifty centimetres long and weighed a kilo and a half. Jacob kept the massive torch in a presentation box with an equally outsized Victorinox knife. She took that for good measure — if they found many more oysters, then she would want to start opening them. In her days as a billionaire oligarch’s beloved princess, she had indulged quite a penchant for oysters, caviar and pink champagne.
Side by side, the two young women ran down the steep riverbank to the edge of the water. Anastasia did not switch on the torch at first, for she really did not want to be summoned back to the Evensong service, and her prickly conscience told her it would only take a word from Sister Charity to call her to heel. With a sense of guilty excitement, the truants ran down the bank in breathless silence until the busy chuckling slithering of the river warned them they were in danger of getting their toes wet. Then Anastasia pushed the Maglite’s switch forward and shaded the eye-watering dazzle with her hand. The red mud of the riverbank slid into the darker rush of water with hardly any differentiation. There were no deep banks or riverine cliffs here. And yet there was flotsam piled along the smooth mud as far back as the roots of the trees above them and the roots of the mangroves that spread away downstream. Like the ubiquitous water hyacinth, the freshwater mangroves were the result of an experiment in the seventies that had got out of hand in the last forty years. The river flooded regularly enough to support them and in places the huge bushes grew to more than fifty feet in height. But there was a strange, unsettling foreignness about them.
The girls kept clear of the mangroves as they searched the bank, side by side, like children. The bright beam of the Maglite soon illuminated a big pile of ebony shells and Anastasia caught them up without a second thought. As she did so, Ado gave a startled gasp — the closest she would ever come to a scream. Anastasia looked down. There, beneath the pile of shell and weed, a skull was grinning up at them. Without a second thought, Anastasia struck out at it as though it had been a spider or a scorpion. The torch hit it like a bat striking a ball and it rolled back into the slick swirl of the river.
‘Hold this,’ ordered Anastasia after a moment, when her breathing returned to normal. Ado took the offered torch and Anastasia pulled the biggest blade out of the Victorinox. With an expert twist, she opened the largest oyster. She pushed the blade on to the glutinous darkness of the creature’s soft body. And both girls gasped again. For the movement of the oyster’s slimy flesh revealed the biggest, blackest pearl that either of them had ever seen.
They were still crouching, side by side, staring down at the jet-black wonder when the Army of Christ the Infant swept out of the jungle and into the compound behind them.
FOUR
Tie
‘White,’ said Richard incredulously. ‘You did say white?’
‘White!’ confirmed Robin, calling through from her bathroom in their suite in the Granville Royal Lodge hotel. The Nelson Mandela Suite, the best that the five star establishment had to offer. Max Asov and his latest flame were in the presidential suite next door. A couple from the IMF were in the royal suite. These three suites comprised the most exclusive in the hotel. The World Bank rep and the various government middle-rankers also in attendance were travelling without partners so no one’s nose had been put too far out of joint by being offered the slightly less magnificent accommodation on the next floor down. And their teams, like Richard’s Heritage Mariner associates, were scattered through the rest of the world-class hotel’s lower floors.
‘Not black?’ Richard insisted, towelling his hair vigorously as he looked glumly down at the bed. Since being driven under armed escort from the airport in a police armoured car with only Dr Holliday and Colonel Kebila for company — except for the squad of soldiers with their Ruger MP-9 semi-automatics — he had checked in and showered, yelling snippets of information through to Robin in her own bathroom next door. The silence in the vehicle had been salutary. And it had frankly come as something of a relief to find that they had pulled up outside the familiar front of Granville Harbour’s premier hotel instead of the equally familiar front of the city’s central police station.